Jonathan Comey: 5 Things We Learned

DENVER — Five things we learned from the Patriots' 26-16 loss to Denver in the AFC Championship in a surprisingly anticlimactic game that wasn't as close as the final score suggested.

JONATHAN COMEY

DENVER — Five things we learned from the Patriots' 26-16 loss to Denver in the AFC Championship in a surprisingly anticlimactic game that wasn't as close as the final score suggested.

Is Manning the greatest of all time? As the Bronco fans were chanting Super Bowl Sunday, and you imagine him beating a great defense in Seattle or San Francisco in two weeks, it's certainly up for debate.

One thing is for sure — he's the best there is right now, and it's not even close.

Manning becomes only the third quarterback to take two different teams to the Super Bowl, joining Kurt Warner and Craig Morton, but Manning has done things that no QB has ever done. He completely resurrected the Colts and Broncos franchises; turned Denver from a team that needed miracles to eke out a win to a team that it took a miracle to beat.

And it would have taken an absolute miracle for anyone to have beaten Manning Sunday — miracles the understaffed Patriots didn't have in their arsenal.

Manning has done nothing but do everything the right way for as long as he's been in the league, and now, with one more win, can add the one thing that was missing — a title where he is the unquestioned reason for the win.

His one title, with Indy in 2006, came largely on the back of the defense, which rose to levels it never reached before or after during that playoff run. Manning? He was terrible, throwing three touchdowns and seven INTs in the four wins. But he "won" a ring! That's all that matters!

Since, he's played extremely solid football in the playoffs, but failed to win the big one despite 15 TDs to 5 interceptions. Haters can finally remove "under .500 in the playoffs" from his resume since he's now 11-11, and he's got a trademark win over Brady under his belt to boot.

"I have put a lot of hard work in, and a lot of people — teammates, coaches, trainers — have helped me along the way," said Manning Sunday, ever the statesman. "Bouncing back from last year's playoff loss to put ourselves in this position is very gratifying."

Maybe teammate Demaryius Thomas (7-134-1), who went from project to Pro Bowler with Manning in the fold the last two years, said it best: "What can you say? He was amazing."

One of the concerns for New England was their depth at secondary, especially at cornerback. When Aqib Talib or Alfonzo Dennard had to sit out during the season, they struggled with Kyle Arrington and Logan Ryan playing more pivotal roles.

I asked safety Devin McCourty about it on Wednesday, and he said it wasn't a concern: "I think sometimes there are situations where that can happen, where something happens and maybe a guy that is playing one position moves to another position. This season for us being unique to any other season, if that happened on Sunday I don't think that would be a problem because we have already had a bunch of guys in playing a bunch of different positions. So if something like that happened, I think we've done it enough in practice, we've done it in games so it would just be, 'Hey, remember in Week 7 when this happened? We're back to doing that for the rest of the game.' So I think we'd be able to move on and just go from there."

Unfortunately, it wasn't the case.

When Wes Welker upended Talib and sent him to the sidelines with rib and knee injuries, an already tall task became mountainous for the Patriots. The Denver trio of Thomas, Eric Decker and Welker finished with 17 catches for 245 yards and a score, and tight ends Julius Thomas and Jacob Tamme were always open.

New England's run defense was excellent (3.8 yards a carry for Denver), but with the pass rush seemingly only able to produce against subpar lines, the guys in the back were stuck fighting battles they couldn't win all day long.

As Dennard said: "It was very frustrating, we lost. That's all I have to say about that."

The most telling play of the game came just as the Patriots were adding brush to the embers of hope late in the fourth quarter. Down 10, they needed a two-point conversion to cut it to eight and a shot at OT.

They handed it to Shane Vereen, who went 1.5 of the two yards needed for the two points, and it was season over.

Add Gronkowski to that mix, and we're looking at a different play call, and probably a success. With Gronkowski in the lineup, Brady can do what he does best — exploit the mismatches and get the ball where it needs to go.

Without Gronk, there are no mismatches. It was true in 2011, where his hobbled performance in the Super Bowl was probably the difference between winning and losing. It was true in 2012, where the Patriots went scoreless against Baltimore in the second half with Gronk on IR. And it was true again Sunday, as New England had no answers for all of Denver's exclamation points.

The Patriots' running game wasn't a factor — as any reasonable analysis told you would be the case leading up to the game — and coming back from a deficit wasn't happening against a Denver offense that was so good.

If Gronkowski and Danny Amendola are healthy next year, and Aaron Dobson continues developing, the Patriots will have a legitimately scary attack again. But the "if" with Gronkowski is so big, and the results of that "if" are so huge, that you wonder just how the Patriots are going to approach the offseason.

I think Brady is as good as Manning over the course of their careers, but facts are facts: if his career started in 2005, he'd be thought of as a quarterback roughly on par with Philip Rivers — great in the regular season, but just OK in the playoffs.

Now, I happen to think Rivers is vastly underrated, but the fact is that when you get to the playoffs eight times in nine seasons and don't win a Super Bowl, that's kind of a big deal. He probably got too much credit when he was winning, and probably doesn't get as much heat as other quarterbacks would with the same resume since.

In the 17 games since 2004, he's 9-8. And he had a passer rating under 80 in eight of the 17 (80 representing a C-minus on that scale). He's achieved more over that span than most of quarterbacks ever will, but when it comes to the "legacy" talk, that's still pretty damning.

Brady's two biggest weaknesses were on display Sunday — he struggles with pressure coming directly at him because he's so slow, and he just doesn't have the ability to throw a good deep ball. Except for the years where he had Randy Moss, Brady has never been able to throw deep — and he needed to on Sunday. Clearly, the Patriots set their offense around getting unexpected long shots, but Brady couldn't connect.

He was good, he didn't turn it over, he made clutch throws, but he didn't do nearly enough to win the game.

It's unfair to judge Brady on how he played in a game his team almost certainly wouldn't have gotten to without him, but that's life in the NFL.

And, for his legacy, there's now work to do.

"We did a decent job to get ourselves to this position," he said after the game. "There are two teams that are playing, and one gets to advance. Certainly I wish I could've done more to help us out."

Brady is the greatest short passer of his era, and a leader who sets the tone for the whole organization. They want to win for Bill Belichick, but they're largely driven to win for Brady. Without him, none of this exists.

But without him doing more, endings like this are going to keep happening.

Everything feels negative after a season-ending loss, but this 2013 season really was something special. You could feel that in the emotion of the locker room Sunday — it wasn't just disappointment, but disappointment that a team that had overcome so much in the end couldn't beat its own limitations.

LeGarrette Blount (traded by Tampa for peanuts before the season): "I am proud of us. Every last guy on this team wanted to go and play in two weeks."

Danny Amendola (played with a torn groin): "We have a bunch of fighters on this team."

Julian Edelman (worked his way from 7th-round pick to 1,000-yard receiver): "It was a pretty special group. I'm thinking about the fellas in this locker room, the coaches, all the hard work we put in this season."

Brady: "I'm proud of our team and the way we fought. We have a lot to be proud of. We will be back at it next year."

Every team suffers injuries, but the Patriots suffered the type that get teams in the top 10 of the draft, get coaches fired. Losing Wilfork? Should have been a killer. Wasn't. Mayo? Impossible to replace. They replaced him. They didn't replace Gronk, but they did come up with a different way to move the ball, and in the end they finished third in the NFL in scoring.

When you look at it that way, as Patriots fans will surely do as memories of this game fade, it's tough to look at this season as anything but a success.